Drugs are not only heroin that makes you feel distant immediately and turns pale at the mention of it, but also common painkillers, cough medicines and anesthetics prescribed by doctors to patients within the scope permitted by law.
Those cough water, which can be bought at any time in Chinese pharmacies, contains codeine and ephedrine. Many teenagers can get pleasure after drinking it and gradually become [drug addicts] without realizing it.
U.S. President Trump announced in August this year that the country has entered a state of public health emergency due to the opioid analgesic crisis. This is the first time that the United States has initiated a state of public health emergency due to a public health incident.
Is cough water [drug]?
A New York Times reader mentioned that his sister has been addicted to opioid painkillers since 1996, initially because of her back pain. According to the back pain regulations, medical insurance will pay for the drug. Doctors keep prescribing her. She has spent nearly one million dollars on painkillers over the years.
However, her current situation is that her children and family can no longer talk to her normally because she has become a [zombie].
In addition to drugs, some anesthetics used for medical purposes, such as [laughing gas], are as addictive as opioid drugs. Overuse of laughing gas has become an important issue that has attracted attention recently. In July this year, we published a report in Phoenix Weekly < < Balloon Poisons China: Harder than Heroin, Buy casually, Inhale Paralysis, Sorrow > >.
According to clinical pharmaceutical experts, the common abuse preparations at present include cough water containing codeine (and ephedrine), antidiarrheal agents containing opioid analgesics (compound diphenoxylate), analgesics (dolantin, morphine, buprenorphine) and some sedatives and hypnotics.
Among them, all kinds of cough water are the most common abused preparations in China.
Codeine contained in cough water is essentially an opioid substance, ephedrine is a psychoactive substance, which can be used to make methamphetamine.
If you take this kind of cough medicine in large quantities and continuously for a long time, codeine will continuously act on opioid receptors in the body for a long time and act on the brain to generate pleasure, similar to heroin addiction.
The symptoms of cough water addiction are almost the same as those of heroin addiction: not drinking will lead to irritability, easy irritability, uneasiness and limb weakness.
In addition, long-term administration will also lead to calcium loss. A boy in Guangdong started abusing cough medicine from the age of 12, with as few as seven or eight bottles and as many as 20 bottles a day. His height actually shrank from 1.72 meters at the peak to 1.60 meters.
CCTV’s Focus interview once mentioned that a young man in Shenyang was addicted to cough water and spent millions of dollars on cough water in three years.
The so-called “shaking head water” popular among some teenagers is a mixture of cough water and cola, which is more addictive.
In the last century, cough water was once popular in Hong Kong and has now been basically controlled, but now it has begun to spread in the Mainland at a very fast speed. Guangdong, Fujian, the three northeastern provinces, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Jiangxi are all relatively serious places.
Data from Shenzhen Food and Drug Administration show that six major manufacturers of cough water, including Federal Cough Dew, produced more than 20 million bottles of cough water in 2010, most of which flowed to Guangdong, while medical institutions in Guangdong used less than 40,000 bottles of cough water that year, which means that most cough water may be abused.
Among the cases contacted by doctors, the youngest cough water addict is only 15 years old, and the abuse population of such drugs has also shown a trend of younger age in recent years. Cough water withdrawal is very difficult and complicated, and the relapse rate is very high.
Serious cough water addicts will have life risks. A doctor mentioned in an article on Zhihu that many serious cough water addicts have hypokalemia, which will lead to general weakness, slow heartbeat or even cessation of patients, leading to life risks.
It is very difficult to completely cut off the use of cough water from the market, because cough water is not only addictive, but also functional, and it is difficult to prohibit manufacturers from producing. In addition, there are many channels for purchasing cough water, including outflow from regular hospitals and pharmacies, and online purchases, as well as illegal smuggling channels.
Phoenix Weekly’s < < Balloon Poisons China: More Hard than Heroin, Buy It Casually, Inhale Paralysis, Pain Not to Live > > mentions that some young people are paralyzed due to excessive [laughing gas].
Nitrous oxide is a medical anesthetic gas and is used as a substitute for drugs. In most parts of the world, it is not illegal to smoke nitrous oxide.
Laughing gas is cheap and can bring short-term pleasure to smokers, so it is common in concerts, nightclubs and festival scenes. In China, laughing gas is more often called “cream gas bomb” and is popular in some bars and nightclubs. You can even easily buy it on some online sales platforms.
Anyone with a brain can become a drug addict.
[As long as you have a brain, you will easily become a drug addict.]
A popular science book on addiction mechanism published by the Joint Publishing Company, “Fatal Drug Addiction”, said this sentence.
If you understand the brain’s addiction mechanism, you will find that this sentence is not alarmist.
People’s sense of the world comes from the central nervous system. In everyone’s brain, There will be complex neural circuits. One of them is neural circuits. We will feel [happy] through it. This feeling of happiness is to maintain the motivation of life. For example, animals will feel happy after obtaining food and sex. This feeling of happiness will encourage animals to participate in this activity more. If animals lose interest in obtaining food and reproduction, then only extinction awaits them.
The book “Fatal Drug Addiction”, An example is used to describe the process of addiction. A person occasionally eats a very good muffin in a bakery. He will go to this bakery again to look for muffins. Delicious muffins will increase his chances of going to the bakery. But this is only a prerequisite for addiction. Eating muffins is not addictive. If the price of muffins becomes unaffordable, buying a muffin will waste a lot of time, and you can easily give up buying it.
But when one day, instead of passing through the bakery to buy a muffin at work, you expect the muffin as soon as you get up and take the risk of being late for work to detour to buy the muffin, then the first step of addiction comes into being.
Those addictive drugs initially activate the brain’s circuits that respond to normal pleasure, just as food and sex do.
But with the daily stimulation of addictive drugs, the brain’s reward system will [expect] this artificial stimulus. When people suddenly stop using drugs, the body will produce the opposite reaction to the pleasant feeling.
For example, the weakening of opioid effect will cause discomfort similar to influenza attacks. Drug addicts have chills and sweating, runny nose and diarrhea. Alcoholics will feel restless and anxious.
This feeling will be accompanied by the desire to take more drugs.
Addicts’ desire for muffins is no longer the initial pursuit of pleasant feeling after eating muffins, but to avoid unpleasant feeling. Even if the taste of muffins has deteriorated and the price of muffins is so high that you cannot afford them, buying a muffin will put you at risk of imprisonment and even kill you, but addicts will still do so.
You can choose not to be a drug addict.
As long as people have brains, there is the possibility of addiction, but why are drug addicts only a minority of the population after all?
In fact, the mechanism of addiction is very complicated, and the scientific community has conducted more multi-level research on genes and acquired environment.
At the genetic level, the mapping of the human genome accelerates the search and determination of genes related to addiction and other diseases.
Scientists are trying to describe the correlation between addiction and mental traits: some adventurous people and mental patients are prone to addiction; Some drug addicts describe a cycle they experience: they often feel anxious or depressed, use alcohol or drugs to treat desperate feelings. With the passage of time and the increasing frequency of drug use, drug addiction becomes the main problem.
This [self-treatment] process is likely to lead many people to addiction, and overuse of drugs is likely to be a symptom of a disease.
An American doctor suggested that Many people who use these street drugs suffer from different degrees of mental problems. They think they have found a way to anesthetize psychotic symptoms and relieve emotional torture. He believes that We don’t pay enough attention to mental health. Addiction symptoms are only a result, not a cause. The real treatment should return to the social and emotional fields to treat addicted individuals. But is it mental problems that lead to drug abuse? Or is drug abuse causing mental problems? Once a person’s life becomes chaotic due to drug abuse, it will definitely lead to the development of depression.
Acquired factors of drug addiction are also the focus of research.
Drug abusers are more likely to grow up in families where their parents abuse drugs. Children of alcoholics are more likely to drink alcohol. Because they grew up suffering from physical and mental abuse by their parents, and a history of physical and mental abuse is another characteristic of many drug abusers, especially among women. In the study of hospitalized alcoholics, 50% to 60% of women grew up in families where their parents drank alcohol.
Previously, people thought that drug addiction usually occurred in poor areas. But it’s actually a bias, In the United States, Many whites and the middle class have also joined the drug abuse camp. The cocaine fever that prevailed among the more educated in the last century is an example. Even if they have good jobs and families, they may be addicted to drugs. Nowadays, the rise in opioid deaths among Caucasians, middle-class men and women has changed people’s view that drug addiction belongs to a specific class.
If a person is never exposed to drugs, of course he is not likely to become addicted. In the study of addiction among professionals in the United States, it is the medical profession who has a higher proportion of addiction because they have more access to these drugs.
The view was therefore expressed that, Americans have zero tolerance for pain, Therefore, the use of various painkillers is very common. They expect to live freely at any time. There are no challenges and difficulties, this is an over-reliance, rather than relying on their own discovery and cultivation of internal advantages to overcome difficulties and solve problems, thus making it easy for them to seek comfort from drugs under difficult circumstances-if there are few opioids, they will fall into other addictive behaviors.
The analysis of addiction by genes, acquired factors and social environment does not reveal the [fate] of addiction. It is a combination of numerous accidental factors.
Every factor will not doomed people to become addicts, that is to say, even if you have a brain that is easy to be deceived, you can choose to refuse to become an addict.